Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of Love

Soon the Death-bell Will Toll

When the last Gospel message has been told in your ears,And the last solemn warning has been given you in tears;When hope shall escape from its place in your breast,Oh, where will your poor weary soul find its rest?ChorusSoon the death-bell will toll—look after your soul;O, sinner be ready, for the death-bell will toll.When the darkness of death shall compass you round,When the friends you have loved are all standing around;Unable to save you now from the tomb,Unable to alter your terrible doom.When before the white throne of His Judgment you stand,"What have you to answer?" the Judge will demand;Oh, terrible moment to be standing alone,When mercy forever and forever is gone.

The End of the Way

The following beautiful lines were written by a girl in Nova Scotia, an invalid for many years:

My life is a wearisome journey;I'm sick of the dust and the heat;The rays of the sun beat upon me,The briars are wounding my feet.But the city to which I am journeyingWill more than my trials repay;All the toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.There are so many hills to climb upward,I often am longing for rest,But He who appoints me the pathwayKnows what is needed and best.I know in His word He has promisedThat my strength shall be as my day;And the toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.He loves me too well to forsake me,Or give me one trial too much;All His people have been dearly purchased,And Satan can never claim such.By and by I shall see Him and praise Him,In the city of unending day;And the toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.When the last feeble steps have been taken,And the gates of the city appear,And the beautiful songs of the angelsFloat out on my listening ear;When all that now seems so mysteriousWill be plain and clear as the day—Yes, the toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.Though now I am footsore and weary,I shall rest when I'm safely at home;I know I'll receive a glad welcome,For the Savior Himself has said "Come."So, when I am weary in body,And sinking in spirit I say,All the toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.Cooling fountains are there for the thirsty,There are cordials for those who are faint:There are robes that are whiter and purerThan any that fancy can paint.Then I'll try to press hopefully onward,Thinking often through each weary day,The toils of the road will seem nothingWhen I get to the end of the way.

Appendix

The matter which I have here appended I thought of too much value to omit from this volume. The first article is explanatory in itself. The second is by a prisoner whom I have known for many years. The third (regarding Christ in Gethsemane) was written by a prisoner as a letter to myself. I hope the reader may profit by the reading of each page.

E. R. W.

The Personnel of Prison Management

Address of C. E. Haddox, warden of the West Virginia penitentiary, to the National Prison Association, at its annual session, Louisville, Ky., Congress of 1903:

This is the age of industrial development. On every side we see colossal enterprises undertaken and prosecuted to a successful and profitable conclusion.

Great railroad systems span the continent, carrying millions of passengers and countless tons of freight, with safety, celerity and dispatch, to the doors of factory, workshop, store and consumer.

Immense industrial enterprises are constantly being projected, consolidated and carried on in a manner to excite the admiration, mayhap, the wonder and fear of mankind.

Colossal financial transactions amaze the minds of those uninitiated to the magnitude and the intricacies of such undertakings.

The unexplored recesses of the earth are exploited in a manner and on a scale heretofore undreamed of and unknown, and every department of enterprise is carried on to a degree that distinctly stamps this decade as the acme of industrial enterprise and achievements, the golden age of industrial prosperity, and the acquirement of material improvement and material gain.

If it be asked why such strides have been made along industrial lines, the answer is that it is due to ORGANIZATION AND SPECIALIZATION.

The PERSONNEL of the management have devoted their lives, their talent and their energies to the special work before them. They have been drilled and educated along special lines; they have been deaf and blind to outside matters not relevant to the work in hand, and by close and careful study, by unceasing and constant labor, care and effort, having evolved, projected and carried on these immense enterprises.

The National Prison Congress at its meeting this year is mindful of the material progress of the country.

This association is equally ambitious along the lines peculiar to itself to obtain from the various penal institutions of the country the highest and best results morally, educationally, reformatively, and as an incident, punitively and financially.

How shall we keep pace in penal improvements with the great material progress of the outside world?

The answer necessarily must be, that improvements in our department of work must come, as they do elsewhere, by the investigation, the study, the thought and the effort of those who are in actual control, of those who are in a position to see, to observe and to know.

In other words, the question as to whether prisons are to improve, whether their work shall continue to be of a higher and nobler character, whether we are finally and forever to break away from the customs of the galleys of France, the prisons of Hawes in England, of the Mamertine of Rome and of Rothenburg in Germany, will depend utterly, entirely and absolutely upon the personnel of the prison management of the country.

Prof. Henderson, in his admirable address delivered at the Philadelphia meeting in 1902, on "The Social Position of the Prison Warden," says: "Some institutions have no marked qualities; they have walls, cells, machinery, prisoners, punishments, but no distinct, consistent and rational policy."

Where this is true it means that the worst possible condition of affairs exists. Such an institution has the dry rot. It is managed (or rather mismanaged) by time servers, too careless to feel the high responsibility devolving upon them, and too listless to acquaint themselves with the many opportunities spread before them to improve and keep pace with the onward march of progress.

Such officers in their abuse, by inaction, of the opportunities afforded them, commit "Crimes against criminals" and through them against society.

On the contrary institutions which have distinct features and characteristics, have them as the result of the careful investigation, the patient research and thought of those who are in responsible and actual control, and these characteristics and features reflect the wisdom and intelligence of those who have given their energies and their lives to the special work before them.

THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

In the management of penal institutions a Board of Directors or of Control is, ordinarily, the nominal head.

By the laws of most states they are supposed to fix the administration policy, to restrict and define the powers and duties of the officers in actual and intimate control.

In some institutions they meet a day or so each month, in most institutions not so frequently. Their duties while at the institution may or may not be largely perfunctory, and as they are generally active business men at home in other channels, the day or two a month or quarter is apt to be regarded by the unthoughtful as a respite or surcease from other duties. The main duty of a Board of Directors or of Control may be said to be the determining of the general policy upon which the institution shall be conducted, and a cursory oversight of the conduct of its affairs.

THE WARDEN

The warden or superintendent is the one official who can give tone, expression and color to the institution. He is distinctly and positively its actual managing head, and upon his intelligence, interest, zeal, tact and discretion will depend, almost entirely, its weal or its woe.

He must be a man of intelligence, and be willing and anxious to increase his fund of knowledge and information.

He should be a profound student not only of the ordinary subjects that attract the student, but of prison systems, of laws, business, government, society as it exists, and of human nature in all its many phases.

HE MUST BE AN ORGANIZER

No difference how elaborate a system may be found in any institution of this kind, the warden will always be an intensely busy and greatly occupied officer.

If he would prevent chaos and confusion and obtain from every official the highest and best work of which he is capable, he must organize every department thoroughly. Every officer and every inmate must know his exact duties, so far as it is possible to know them, and be made responsible for those duties and the warden must be enabled to appreciate a high order of talent and the accomplishment of good work, and to locate the blame for omissions and short comings, and provide for their correction.

Thorough system in every detail will conserve the capacities of all his subordinates and leave him in a measure free to observe the actual conditions and to plan and to put into effect improvements along moral, industrial, physical and financial lines.

HE MUST BE A FINANCIER

The financial question in every prison in the land is an extremely important one. Funds for prisons are doled out grudgingly, and the demand for absolutely necessary purposes is always far greater than the supply.

A warden performs no more important function than when he sees that the funds of the institution are so used as to effect the highest possible results, and that all the forces of the prison are so energized and conserved as to permit, under ordinary conditions, a satisfactory and proper earning and economizing power. With the many demands made upon him for means for increasing the usefulness of his institution, a high order of financial aptitude is an absolutely necessary characteristic in a successful warden.

DISCIPLINE

Discipline in a prison is its first requisite. Nothing can be accomplished until officers and convicts are under its sway and control.

The warden who would have control of those under him must himself at all times, be under self control.

The maxim "No one knows how to command who has not first learned how to obey," is a trite and a true one. The population of a prison is made up of a heterogeneous collection of people whose first instincts have been and are, not to obey.

To bring such people into habits of obedience and control requires the highest type of skill, tact and discretion. Punishments and reward must be so blended and combined as to effect the needful results with the least possible friction, and in the most humane and rational manner possible.

No warden can afford to delegate the matter of enforcing discipline entirely or partly, if at all, to another. His first duty to himself, that he may know actual conditions as they exist, is to preside over or assist in, the trial of offenders and to order discipline.

Individual treatment is a necessity in our dealings with delinquents, and a study of the many phases of delinquency is a prime requisite in a successful warden's repertoire.

Brainard F. Smith says: "Many a prisoner has been reformed—or, if not reformed, made a better prisoner—by punishment."

Will the warden have any higher duty to perform than to face his delinquent delinquents and to order in merciful severity, rational punishments for their short-comings?

But a warden's disciplinary powers are apt to be taxed more severely in another direction. The great problem ordinarily, is not so much the discipline of convicts as that of subordinate officers. If subordinate officers will obey the spirit and the letter of the rules, the convict has the potential influence of a powerful example to aid him. "Like master like man."

In institutions where officers are appointed solely with reference to their fitness, comparatively little trouble should be had in the matter of proper official discipline. But where places are given to heelers, ward-workers and political strikers, the matter of efficient discipline is a question of grave concern to the warden. In the absence of better material, however, he must address himself to organizing what he has to the highest efficiency possible, and insist and require a rigid regimen and adhere to his demands and requirements with Spartan firmness.

THE PRISON SCHOOL

The educational work of a prison is of the highest, I may say, of the first importance. The education of the hands to work comes naturally, partly as an incident of the necessary work carried on in prison.

Nearly all convicts are densely ignorant. The polished, scholarly, shrewd criminal of whom we hear so much, and to whom the papers and books give so much prominence, is the exception, not the rule, in prison.

If the prison is to have a reformatory feature, it must come very largely through the school. Many prison schools are such only in name. The work accomplished is very meager. The results are very unsatisfactory.

To no part of prison work should a warden address himself with more ardor and determination than so to organize the prison school as to make it the great positive factor in dispelling ignorance and its attendant viciousness, and in quickening and enlivening the moral sense in those whose moral judgment is exceedingly obtuse.

The course of study in a prison school is necessarily a very elementary one, and unless followed by a supplementary course of reading and study, will be of little permanent and practical benefit. Many prison libraries, largely the result of indiscriminate and heterogeneous donations of all kinds of literature, good, bad and indifferent, chiefly the latter, are not in a position to be a positive force.

Let the warden see that his library is so arranged, classified and used as to be a source of information, profit, help and pleasure to the inmates, and that a course of reading along rational lines is laid out, encouraged, and, if possible, adhered to, in order that the preliminary school course may not have been in vain.

COURAGE NEEDED

The warden must be a man of courage. I do not refer to the kind of courage necessary to face a regiment of depraved and wicked men shorn of their power and their stimulus to do evil, but that high moral courage necessary to clean the Augean stables of abuses of customs, to reverse policies of long standing that are nevertheless wrong in principle and in practice, to fight against unjust, improper and unwise legislative propositions concerning his institution; the kind of courage that prompted the chaplain in Chas. Reade's "NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND," to fight and destroy the iniquitous prison system of Keeper Hawes and his minions; the courage that will keep to the fore-front a persistent opposition to prostituting penitentiaries into eleemosynary institutions and political cribs and feeding troughs for political strikers.

He must have the courage to weed out and eliminate useless barnacles in the shape of incompetent and worthless employes, and substitute in their stead men of capacity, character and intelligence, who are in love with their work and believe in its dignity and usefulness; the courage to face demagogues in their efforts to take from the prison its educative, moral, reformatory and economic force, the right of the unfortunate inmates to learn the gospel of labor under right and just conditions.

OPTIMISM NECESSARY

The warden needs to be intensely optimistic. He must have a reserve fund of enthusiasm. He must believe profoundly in the high character of his office and educate others constantly to believe in it. The ignorance of the great mass of the people as to the real function of penitentiaries and the methods by which they are carried on is amazing and mortifying to prison officials.

A part of the warden's mission is to acquaint the outside world with conditions as they exist inside, and to inspire the interest and support of the general public in measures for bettering and improving prison conditions. Legislative bodies especially, need to be brought into closer relations and the law makers made to realize their duty to the public and the convict in the enactment of wise, proper and righteous legislation.

Longfellow, in his beautiful poem, "THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP," tells why the master builder achieved success. It was because

"His heart was in the work and the heartGiveth grace to every art."

The warden's heart must be in his work. His whole soul must be animated and permeated with an honest and sincere desire to bring penology up to a higher and nobler standard.

He must have a reserve force of enthusiasm that will not be daunted and destroyed by temporary failures or the lapses of some discharged or pardoned convicts, who, in spite of care and pains, will return to their evil ways. The enthusiasm that can bear the harsh and ignorant criticism and misrepresentations incident to his work; the enthusiasm that in its contagion will inoculate directors, subordinate officers, the press and the people with a desire for more light on penal problems and a purpose to be governed by that light; the enthusiasm that will beget great patience for the exacting, difficult and trying problems before him; that will make him believe that "a convict saved is a man made"; that will make him believe with the great English novelist "It is never too late to mend," and that as infinite care and pains finally brought Robinson, the twice convicted thief, up to the estate of honest manhood, so, infinite care and pains should be exerted with every man under his charge.

Pessimism has no rightful place in a penitentiary. In the language of Socrates, "Why should we who are never angry at an ill-conditioned body, always be angry with an ill-conditioned soul?"

The ignorant Hawes believed in the profitless crank, the black-hole, the deprivation of food, of bed, of clothing, the tortures of the waist jacket and the collar, and a sign over the door, "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."

The twentieth century warden believes in the gospel of productive labor, of education of hand, head and heart, in the deprivation of privileges, largely as punishment, the segregation of the desperate and nearly hopeless, the enlightenment of an all-powerful, all potential, all influential example and the motto of Pope Clement, "It is of little advantage to restrain criminals by punishment unless you reform them with training and teaching."

THE CHAPLAIN

The chaplain occupies an extremely important but delicate position in prison management. It is possible for him to be of vast influence and power for good.

The chaplain needs to be a man of large heart, aided by an abundance of sound common sense. He needs to bear in mind constantly, in the difficult and delicate work he is called upon to perform, that the discipline of the prison must be upheld and enforced.

Associate officers are frequently disturbed with the fear that the chaplain's influence will subvert the discipline of the prison; that the shrewd, unprincipled convicts by pouring into his ears their imaginary tales of woe, may succeed in working him.

The chaplain's first requirement, if he would succeed, is not to lose sight of the majesty of the law and of the prison rules.

The chaplain and the warden should go hand in hand, the one sustaining the other. They need to have a perfect understanding, neither mistrusting the other. Frequent conferences ought to enable them to proceed along proper lines. The chaplain's opportunities are limitless. I do not undertake to say what direction his duties shall take him. That will be discussed fully in the Chaplain's Association.

It is personal, individual work that counts in a prison. All the chaplain's work should be thought out beforehand, be methodical, premeditated, intentional, systematic and thorough. His chapel service should be rational, of the proper length, with exercises, song service and preaching service carefully chosen. There should be no room in a prison service for the spectacular, the highly emotional and the haphazard sermons and addresses of a chance visitor. A reasonably rigid censorship ought to be exercised over the contributions of outsiders to the chapel service.

The influence of sight seers and idle visitors to prisons, always bad, reaches the acme of its perniciousness in the chapel service, if unrestrained and unguided by prison officials of experience and firmness, who alone are in a position to know that sickly sentimentality is the worst possible pabulum to offer men already too eager to justify their evil deeds.

THE PHYSICIAN

A physician's duties in a prison are necessarily onerous, important and difficult. Convicts are constantly claiming that they are unable physically to do the work assigned them. No one can determine the truthfulness of their statements except the physician, and to determine whether the convict is really ill or exercising his usual finesse to shirk his duties, requires keen judgment of human nature as well as an accurate knowledge of his profession.

The convict, housed and hemmed in, is peculiarly susceptible to hallucinations and to thinking that he is afflicted with imaginary ills.

A physician needs a large fund of good judgment, will-power and common sense to combat successfully with this class of people. How far he should use some of the subterfuges supposed to be employed by physicians in the outside world in dealing with people afflicted with hypochondria, I am unable to say, but a certain amount of cheerfulness coupled with firmness is undoubtedly of great value.

SUBORDINATE OFFICERS

The subordinate officers of a prison are very important factors in the management of a prison. They come in actual, continual, personal contact with the men.

No difference how capable and zealous may be the warden and his deputy, unless they have men of character, zeal, intelligence and discretion to carry out their orders and wishes faithfully and well, all their plans will come to naught.

Guards, keepers and watchmen should be of good moral character. It is useless to talk about reforming convicts unless they have continually the benefit of good examples set before them. Precept amounts to nothing unless re-enforced by good examples.

They should be educated and intelligent.

Their duties are largely discretionary, and in their contact with convicts a high order of intelligence is necessary to know the right thing to do. Strict integrity and truthfulness are prime requisites. An officer's word should be beyond question and he should be absolutely impartial in his dealings with his men.

No special system will bring the highest results with any kind of men behind it. Any system with men of character, conscience and capacity will achieve great good. Any system with men of bad character, ignorant, careless and indifferent, will fall to the ground.

A common impression prevails that any one is good enough for a prison guard, and if he is too old, too feeble and decrepit or too lazy for other work, his political strikers will try to unload him on the penitentiary authorities.

Prison Directors, Wardens and all in authority should set their faces resolutely against this erroneous and terribly harmful idea. Partisan politics should not be a factor in the appointment or the retention of any prison officer. All subordinates should be appointed under civil service rules and be required to pass a civil service examination, and after entering upon his duties be required to take up a course of study on penological questions and problems and be otherwise carefully schooled and drilled along the lines of their work. If time demonstrates their unfitness for the position they should be summarily removed. If they manifest an aptitude and an interest in their work they should be encouraged, promoted and protected against removal for partisan reasons.

Whenever directors in banks are elected with reference to their political proclivities and not with reference to their business sagacity, it will be proper to select prison officials for the same reason.

Whenever great business firms discharge their managers because their political views do not coincide with those of the owners, then and not till then should prison officials step down and out for political reasons.